Does certainty tone matter? Effects of review certainty, reviewer characteristics, and organizational niche width on review usefulness

Consumers' purchase intentions in social commerce: the role of social psychological distance, perceived value, and perceived cognitive effort

Purpose

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become one of the most influential information sources for consumers' purchase decision-making. Based on construal-level theory and from the perspective of cognitive effort, this study investigated the effects of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions and validated the mediation role of social psychological distance, perceived value, and perceived cognitive effort.

Design/methodology/approach

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted to validate the research model. Specifically, a 2 (eWOM social media type: strong-tie vs weak-tie) × 2 (conflicting eWOM: with vs without) between-subjects design was used. ANOVA, multiple regression analysis with PROCESS, and partial least squares (PLS) were employed to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The results showed that eWOM social media types had significant effects on both social psychological distance and perceived value. The significant chain mediating effects of social psychological distance and perceived value between eWOM social media types and consumers' purchase intentions were found. In addition, conflicting eWOM had significant effects on both perceived value and perceived cognitive effort. Indirect effects of conflicting eWOM on purchase intention through perceived cognitive effort were discovered.

Originality/value

These results contribute to the eWOM literature by investigating the influences of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions. They also contribute to construal-level theory by extending its applicability to the field of eWOM.

Language interpretation in travel guidance platform: Text mining and sentiment analysis of TripAdvisor reviews

The opinions and feelings expressed by tourists in their reviews intuitively represent tourists' evaluation of travel destinations with distinct tones and strong emotions. Both consumers and product/service providers need help understanding and navigating the resulting information spaces, which are vast and dynamic. Traditional sentiment analysis is mostly based on statistics, which can analyze the sentiment of a large number of texts. However, it is difficult to classify the overall sentiment of a text, and the context-independent nature limits their representative power in a rich context, hurting performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This work proposes an aspect-based sentiment analysis model by extracting aspect-category and corresponding sentiment polarity from tourists' reviews, based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) model. First, we design a text enhancement strategy which utilizes iterative translation across multiple languages, to generate a dataset of 4,000 reviews by extending a dataset of 2,000 online reviews on 1,000 tourist attractions. Then, the enhanced dataset is reorganized into 10 classifications by the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. Finally, the aspect-based sentiment analysis is performed on the enhanced dataset, and the obtained sentiment polarity classification and prediction of the tourism review data make the expectations and appeals in tourists' language available. The experimental study generates generic and personalized recommendations for users based on the emotions in the language and helps merchants achieve more effective service and product upgrades.